Re: [vox-tech] Linux/Windows virus

[Micah Cowan <micah@cowaMAPSnbox.com>]

On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 01:21:23AM -0700, Foo Lim wrote:
> Yeah, I'm replying to my own post...
> 
> This was just a heads-up or public service announcement.  It's as
> dangerous as other infectious digital organism when you're talking about
> open source software, IMO.
> 
> FL
> 
> On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Foo Lim wrote:
> 
> > http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010402S0004
> > http://www.avx.com/winux.html
> >
> > Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  So will antivirus software
> > start showing up on freshmeat.net or will people actually look over the
> > code they download from now on?  There still is a safety net with file
> > permissions, but if you install this virus as root, there's potential for
> > getting screwed royally.
> >
> > FL

This was in slashdot a week ago.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/28/1357253&mode=thread

It isn't nearly what it looks like - the Linux side of it is more of a
trojan than a virus - in order for it to infect your computer, you
first have to acquire an infected binary, and then run it (and then it
still only has that user's priveleges).

Raise your hand if you'd be stupid enough to run an unknown executable
as root?

Just because it exists doesn't mean it is effective.  It has probably
a 1% chance of actually propogating from one host to another, which
means that it really isn't alive.

As the slashdot article poster, timothy, notes: "this is anything but
an "equal opportunity" virus, except in that it seems to infect
multiple media sources without discrimination. When was the last time
you ran unknown programs (as root) on your machine, then manually
copied them (and ran as root) on another machine as well?"

Micah